When a mobile device is being served by a base station, the serving base station can utilize specified resource blocks for transmission associated with the mobile device. When a user with a mobile device is traveling, the mobile device may reach a point where the synch channel signal strength between the mobile device and the serving base station can be of a similar magnitude as the synch channel signal strength(s) between the mobile device and one or more neighbor base stations. At this point, the mobile station can be at a cell edge, where the mobile device potentially may receive interference from a neighboring base station serving the mobile device on the same resource blocks or channels as the serving base station.
Conventionally, a base station can communicate with neighbor base stations (e.g., via an X2 interface in LTE) to indicate to the neighbor base stations which resource blocks are being employed by the base station. However, using such resources to signal the resource blocks that are in use can be inefficient as that can leave such resources unavailable for other purposes, such as delivering data from a base station towards the Internet or delivering data to another mobile device.
Further, signaling related to in-use resource blocks between base stations can occur very frequently (e.g., approximately every 2 milliseconds in LTE), which can utilize a lot of transport resources. It can be desirable to reduce the amount of direct signaling between the base stations, particularly with regard to indicating in-use resource blocks, so that the transport resources can be available for other uses, such as transmitting data to a mobile device or the Internet.
Also, base stations may have a limited amount of transport resources available, while having radio resources available that are not being used. Mobile devices often can be sitting idle or are not being utilized at maximum capacity. It can be desirable to be able to leverage available resources such as, for example, available radio resources, to enable more efficient communication between mobile devices, between mobile devices and base stations, and/or between base stations, even when transport resources are limited or unavailable.